Ted Bonin, a seasoned dealer who helped transform a diverse set of artists into institutional mainstays, death from natural causes at his Manhattan home on Tuesday, April 4. He was 65 years old.
The news was confirmed by Alexander and Bonin, the gallery he co-founded nearly three decades ago with fellow art dealer Carolyn Alexander.
“In 1995 when Ted and I started Alexander and Bonin, we shared the same goals, which were to represent artists and build their careers,” Alexander said in a statement shared with Artnet News. She called Bonin a “generous and supportive colleague” and said, “Our years of working together have been deeply rewarding for me and the artists we have worked with”.
“We join our colleagues, curators and artists he worked with in expressing our deep sadness at his passing,” Alexander continued.
Since its founding, Alexander and Bonin have developed a reputation for working with rigorous, genre-defying artists, many of whom are now deceased and underappreciated in their lifetime. Mona Hatoum, now one of the most accomplished artists in the world, had her first significant exhibitions at the gallery, as did John Ahearn and Rita McBride.
The gallery, and Bonin in particular, have developed lasting relationships with artists’ estates, including those of Ree Morton, who was killed in a car crash in 1977, and Paul Thek, who died of complications from the AIDS in 1988. Bonin was instrumental in bringing a retrospective of the latter artist’s work to the Whitney Museum in 2010.
“With Ted’s death, I have lost a dear friend and colleague,” said Elisabeth Sussman, curator of the Whitney’s Thek retrospective. ART newswho first broke the news of Bonin’s passing. “Ted was exceptional as a scholarly and demanding advocate for every artist he represented, as a dealer, including but not limited to Paul Thek and Sylvia Mangold. He will be missed by many.”
Bonin was born in 1958 and raised in Beverly, Massachusetts. At the age of 18, he moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied art history. In 1980, after graduating, Bonin went to work as an assistant to the director of the art loan department at the Museum of Modern Art. About three years later, Bonin joined the Brooke Alexander Gallery, which Alexander had previously founded with her husband.
The Alexanders separated in the early 1990s, when Brooke Alexander took control of the eponymous gallery and Carolyn Alexander parted ways with Bonin to found Alexander and Bonin.
The duo’s first exhibition, a presentation of photographs and videos by Irish artist Willie Doherty, opened on New Tork’s Wooster Street in 1996. A year later, Alexander and Bonin moved to Chelsea, a neighborhood that was , at the time, better known for its industrial activities. workmanship as art. But the gallery remained in the same location for the next 19 years, and in doing so helped make the neighborhood one of the city’s premier art destinations.
In 2016, Alexander and Bonin decamped to another booming arts district, Tribeca. The move represented something of a homecoming for the gallery, which settled into a building a few blocks from the site of its first space.
“The architecture and feel of the neighborhood reminds me of when I first went to galleries in the 70s and 80s,” Bonin said of the move in a 2016 interview with the New York Times. The new location, he added, is reminiscent of a time “when no one was talking about the market”.
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